[Foundation-l] The Mediawiki 1.18 image rotation bug on Commons and on all Wikimedia projects

Tue Dec 13 03:48:12 UTC 2011

On Mon, Dec 12, 2011 at 12:12 PM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:

> What was messed up was the
> presentation of images that were already displayed correctly.

Well, technically, they were displayed incorrectly. ;-) The image told
the software "Please rotate me", and the software didn't. But the
image would tell any other software the same thing, causing pain for
re-users. So it was definitely an issue that needed to get resolved,
one way or another. I don't know off-hand how many images are affected
(the estimate on Commons is about 50,000, but I don't know what that's
based on).

The thing is, we've always gotten "drive-by" uploads by users who
didn't bother to fix any rotation issues with their images after
upload, and so we can't just go back and strip EXIF info from all old
files, because some old files were fixed by the change. It looks to me
like the only sensible response is human review followed by rotation
of images that need to be fixed -- which is precisely what's
happening, with a bot performing rotations as needed.

I've asked Rob Lanphier to look at this as well and determine if an
additional response is needed; if you think there's more we can/should
do to help, please let him know.

The best place for further discussion of this issue is:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons_talk:Rotation
-- 
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation

Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate